The Spirit of "la Caixa"

From 8 February to 20 May 2012

Actions in the Universe is the culminating work in the series "Actions", a project that brought David Bestué and Marc Vives together on a collaborative artistic initiative ten years ago, and which has helped to make them the young Catalan artists with the greatest international projection today. The basic concerns behind their work, whose main characteristics are intelligent humour and an uninhibited attitude towards cultural conventions, are to activate the public space and to establish direct relations with people. "Actions" comprises four works in very different formats that take as their themes the urban space, the domestic space, the human body and, finally, an idea of the universe. The precarious nature of the media used and the artists' interest in accentuating experience is the consequence of their affinities with the legacy of conceptual art and the desacralisation of the art object. References to 20th-century art and culture are constant in all the works, interspersed with others related to their own personal imagery. Bestué-Vives use reality itself as the context, representing it in situations and narrative fictions in which paradox and the absurd are strategies for shaking up and rethinking reality in our own lives.

With the aim of providing a broader understanding of these artists' work, Actions in the Universe (2008), recently acquired by Contemporary Art Collection "la Caixa" Foundation, is presented in this exhibition together with the videos Actions at home (2005), Story of the Enamoured Scorpion (2008) and State of Change (2010).